Some things are worth writing about

Monthly Archives: August 2011

So in my last post I served up a poem which started with a quote from ‘a great writer’, and I just realized I didn’t even explain it! Silly me…

The quote is from my favorite poem by one of my favorite writers, Charles Bukowski. It’s called The Laughing Heart:

your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.

The poem was recently featured in a TV Ad by Levi Jeans for their campaign ‘Go Forth 2011’, check it out!

So I just thought I’d clarify/share that, hope you like it as much as I do!

So yeah…it’s taken me a while to get back to writing regularly, but during my mental preparation for the onset of Senior year (dun-dun-duuuuuun) my subconscious must’ve thrown in a footnote reminder ‘re: poetry’ because all of a sudden it’s like a mental fountain with no pressure valve! (Did that last sentence make me sound smart? I hope so, I worked real hard on it…)

Innyway, I revisited one of my older pieces (not sure if I posted it ever) after being randomely inspired by my new favorite poem. I mean, favorite favorite poem. I mean, the best poem in the universe which now details my very existence. I had been very unhappy with this poem for quite a while, but at a loss on how to fix it. Now, however, it seems a smidgen closer to just-about-perfect. Enjoy 😉

PS: It’s a Spoken Word poem, which accounts for the lack of conventional line breaks and formatting, etc.

Living

A great poet once wrote, “You can’t beat death, but you can beat death in life, sometimes.” That phrase used to beat against the inside of my skull like the sparrow trapped inside my screened back porch; the bird is confused because it can’t see what keeps it inside and I was too, because I couldn’t write something like that. Then I realized it; by ‘life’, the poet didn’t mean breathing – this banal rhythm which keeps us conscious by the pressure on our ribs – but experiencing!

Because this world is a wrinkled walnut in the palm of your hand, and while it may be easier to admire it from the outside, cracking open that shell is the only way your eyes will ever taste the sprawling landscape under a walnut’s arcing ceiling not unlike that of a gothic cathedral.

I wish I could show you. Show you a life painted with sorrow and excitement and a sky made of the underside of thousands of birds’ wings and that big round sun which is really a billowing hot-air balloon rising and falling on a breath and if we fall too, something will always be there just waiting to catch.

But I can’t show you. I can only encourage you to find it on your own. Jump, and trust that the parachute will open. Fall, and expect the whiplash of a bungee cord or the grasp of strong arms. And when all the world goes up in flames, be the one person who enjoys the artistry of the fire; imitate its snapping voice in your throat and know that everything will be all right in the end and that being in the darkness is only an opportunity to make more light.

Then you can take that walnut-shell-world and shatter it into a thousand pieces that we can add to our stained-glass mosaic, made up of other broken things which we can combine to make something beautiful again. So go be a character in this Technicolor film in which we’ll tie bells around our feet and laugh like the wind on a November morning. In fact, let’s attach strings to that laughter and float it like a kite in the sky for everyone to see because then maybe they will understand too.

Understand how we can look at the trickles of rainwater running down the windowpane and compare it to the movements of a calligrapher’s brush and then run outside and turn cartwheels in that same rain and scream to the thunder and leap into the lightning because 3 million volts is the surest way to get that natural high which lets us know we’re really still alive.